October 2011
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On Reporting Project Task Progress →
Percent complete is meaningless.
September 2011
3 posts
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“We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that...”
– Stephen J. Gould, interview, Life (December 1988).
Actually, why we’re here is to take care of each other. There’s no one else to do it.
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“Really I don’t know anything other than Jersey. I like the dirtiness of it. Now...”
– Frank Iero (via everything-frank-iero)
August 2011
5 posts
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Why Share? →
A great summary of why we socially share, beyond the obvious keeping in touch with people who have passed through your life.
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How will Google Plus will end up fitting in my web... →
Why there’s been a slacking of content here in my Tumblr blog.
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A Great Educational Program →
Hey folks - if your kids are between 5th grade and 12th, pass this along to their teachers. I used to be involved in running this program and it’s truly a great experience that will take your kids around the world (virtually). [Would it be inappropriate for me to hope that a lot of people share this?]
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Marketing Link: The Digital Marketer's Checklist →
A discussion of the things that should be taken into account in designing a digital marketing effort… What is the objective of the campaign?
What digital measures align with the objective?
What efforts outside of digital can we align with?
What role should innovation play in this effort?
How can we be smarter in this effort versus previous efforts?
Go read the whole thing…The...
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PM Link: A Daily Project Execution Plan →
The piece I’ve linked to today offers up a framework for focusing project communications on immediate tasks at hand. The author - Atul Gaur - thinks of it as a “daily execution plan”, but it bears very close resemblence to what I like to do on a weekly basis. The nature of the big single-project work domain that he works in probably makes daily worthwhile, but in the...
July 2011
43 posts
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“The emergence of “Christian” terrorism in Europe does absolutely nothing to...”
– The Blog : Christian Terrorism and Islamophobia : Sam Harris
Commenting on the recent events in Norway.
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PM Link: The Client's Responsibility for Project... →
I’ve been known to suggest that the toughest resources to manage in a project are your boss and the project’s client. This link offers some thoughts about what it takes to maximize the latter’s contribution.
Bottom line…if you’re a project client, try to help the project team help you accomplish what you’re looking for from the project.
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PM Link: On Priorities →
Reblogged from idealgentleman:
A gentleman always knows what matters. He always knows what’s most important.
People talk about “priorities” and “priority lists”; they talk about “top ten priorities” and something being “a high priority”.
The truth is, you can only ever have one priority. Something is either your priority, or…[go read the rest]
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“Why do so many professionals say they are project managing, when what they are...”
– Colin Bentley, 1997
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Reading and Recommended
Reading and Recommended: With my new train commute, I’m re-discovering reading, thanks to the Kindle app on my iPad. Easing into it with two collections of short pieces: Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (by David Eagleman) and Stories: All-New Tales (edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio).
Sum is a collection of very (very) short pieces describing possibilities for something no one...
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The Big Ideas podcast: The medium is the message →
A new podcast from The Guardian plans to offer up short analyses of “Big Ideas”. While I would have preferred more than 10 minutes on the prescient philosopher of media, Marshall McLuhan, what they do with those 10 minutes is excellent.
One bit I didn’t know was that the title of “The Medium is the Massage” was a typo that McLuhan liked and kept, conflating the...
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Management Link: "Why measure it if you are not... →
A good question (and answer) from Joe Ely.
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PM Link: Value of Project Managers →
A study reported in The Economist suggests that a case could be made for value in game software revenues that’s more attributable to project managers (producers in the game world) than designers.
…some 30% of differences in revenue between games could be attributed to the producer and the designer alone; and that the lion’s share of this variation was due to the producer. The boring...
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“Being really busy is seductive – it has nothing to do with getting things done,...”
– Brad Feld
(reblogged from strangelypoignant)
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“Agencies, departments, and organizations don’t do things — people do things....”
– Edward Tufte
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Creativity Video: Why Man Creates
…from Saul Bass.
Part 1:
Part 2:
[via ze frank]
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Marketing Link: Feedback Loops →
What are They and Why are They Important for Marketing?
Whether or not we could articulate what feedback loops are and why they work, this trend of reflecting useful data back to customers was going to grow no matter what.
From the head of Zeus Jones.
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PM Links: Multi-project Management and...
Links to last month’s 4-part series…
Part 1 - Organizations are multi-project systems
Part 2 - Organizational effectiveness is resource effectiveness
Part 3 - Managing the present and the future
Part 4 - It’s what you finish; not how much you start
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“And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those...”
– (reblogged from emadness)
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Mobile Post: Writing for the Mobile Web - Less is...
The primary keys to successful mobile content are brevity and focus. As one wag has said, “it’s like writing for the web, only more so.”
The mobile reader/user is not sitting in the comfort of their home or office with the screen in front of them as their main focus. Their attention is often divided, and if you expect to get through the clutter of their surroundings, you must be prepared to edit...
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PM Post: Relay Race, Interrupted
Quite a while ago, back in my independent consulting days, a discussion list I participated in carried a thread about how to engrain and assure appropriate behaviors in management of a project organization. Around the same time, the following had come into my inbox from a different source, and for some reason I thought of that discussion…
There’s a story about an MIT student who...
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Management Link: 10 CEOs Who Became 'Job Killers' →
Linking to Neutron Jack in the slide show…
I can’t figure out for the life of my why CNBC has darn near beatified Jack Welch, while GE is just now coming out from under the impact of his “leadership”.
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Social Link: LinkedIn basics for small business →
Seven ways to actually get something out of LinkedIn for business…
Not all groups are equal…
Brand it properly…
Take you profile seriously…
Save your searches…
Create a company page…
Actually update your status…
Use questions and answers…
Go read Seven ways to actually get something out of LinkedIn for business for the details.
[via...
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Social Link: Social Media: Understand the... →
A good intro to some social media basics.
…One of the first things a company needs to realize about social media is that Facebook and LinkedIn, for instance, are different animals. While all social media outlets have scalability, accessibility and immediacy in common, they serve distinct functions. For example, YouTube is a great way to demonstrate a product or method, while a Wiki (and...
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Productivity Link: Save Our Inboxes! Adopt the... →
We’re drowning in email. And the many hours we spend on it are generating ever more work for our friends and colleagues. We can reverse this spiral only by mutual agreement. Hence this Charter…
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Link: Defining the problem →
Jack Vinson points out in his piece, Defining the problem, that…
…the first blush “solution” to problems is often a treatment of the symptoms, rather than a solution that will remove the symptoms altogether.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves…
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Productivity...Not
It’s amazing how much stuff Tumblrers tag with “productivity” that have nothing to do with the topic.
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PM Post: A Relay Race, not a Train Schedule
Most projects are managed by carefully watching the calendar, comparing where we are today against some baseline schedule. That schedule typically consists of a series of start and due dates for consecutive tasks, with due dates of predecessors matching start dates of successors. Like a train schedule, if a task arrives at its completion on or before its due date, that portion of the project is...
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“One cannot manage too many affairs: like pumpkins in the water, one pops up...”
– Chinese Proverb
(reblogged from simplyhasanah)
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PM Link: Requirements and Specifications →
A good summary and set of descriptions of key project documents…
User Requirements
System Requirements
Functional Requirements
Functional Specs
Design Specs
Flow or Logic Diagrams
System Architecture Diagram
Prototypes and Mock-ups
Technical Specs
Read the whole thing at Requirement and Specifications.
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Mobile Post: Easy Mobile Landing Pages from Google
Last weekend, I was intrigued to see this year’s tourism map for Ocean City, NJ and the full page of QR codes it contained that linked to local business sites. The only problem was that everyone I tried ended up at what was just the shop’s standard desktop site. Some even featured flash, which was useless on my iPhone.
If you’re going to the trouble to create QR codes for mobile...
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Link: Why U.S. is not a Christian nation →
For the Fourth - Various founding father references that make clear that the original intent…
…was this simple — government could not dictate how to pray, or that you cannot pray, or that you must pray.
Amen.
I agree with Santorum that our history education has been influenced by ideology. I disagree with which ideology has prevailed (so far).
Link: Why U.S. is not a...
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Yankee Doodle Dandy - The Short Version
Spike Jones - I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy by perruche
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Holiday Link: Happy Birthday America! →
The birth announcement
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Jean Shepherd’s Classic 4th of July Story...
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Political Link: Take the Bachmann-Palin Challenge →
Can You Tell Them Apart?
Take the “quiz” at Rolling Stone’s national affairs section
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